From the bottom of the heap to 'elite'

That’s right folks. The time’s are a changin’. And I’m ready to branch off into my second category- Master of Heroics. Yes, the implications are shocking. I’m not just talking about stuff now. I’m running instances. It’s pretty insane. Although I’ve been sort of semi-farming heroics, today is the first day I’ve really put some time into it. So, I’m taking a break from the dungeons to share my experiences so far.

Firstly, I’m not done with the Fresh 80 posts. Although I’m ready to move on, I realize my posts there have been less than regular, and I’m not done walking you through all the basics. I’ll still post there. But the level at which I’m currently at in my PvE career is heroics, so I’m going to open up the next category about that.

So, to go over some of the beautiful events of the day thus far in a nutshell- I’m slowly starting to suck less.

I know, it’s a crazy statement.

The first heroic of the day, I nearly got kicked out of due to being the “drood with 900 dps lol”. Yes, I am so amazing, that I nearly got kicked out of a random dunegon group. I am just that awesome. But, after wipping a couple times (NOT because of me, more on that in a latter post), I managed to get through it, and net some Emblems of Triumph AND frost. Pretty sweet. From there, it only got easier.

By the second heroic I was getting my feet under me, and managed an epic 1100 dps. In PvP gear. I was pretty proud of myself. 1100 damage every SECOND! That’s incredible (not really, but just go with it)! And although I was still doing pretty aweful, that time no one commented on my mad skillz.

The day has been going like that since. I’m slowly using more mouse commands and less keyboard clicking/turning, which I’m sure is helping. But, most importantly, I’m getting used to my class/spec. The mamoth of complexity that is feral dps is slowly begining to make sense. And that excites me immensly. So far, I’m coming out at a steady 1600 dps, which I’m sure will improve as the day goes on. Plus, I’m sporting my first piece of T9 gear, which should help too.

The really exciting thing is that it’s actually going okay. I should be runing about in 232 gear in a couple weeks, and from there it’s 245, then some raids and… T10! I’m pumped!

At any rate, I’m off to go annihilate some more heroic bosses. I’ll drop another update later today on the results of my first day of heroic farming. Happy pwning!

To pick up where I left off yesterday- there’s a debate that has been buzzing around the WoW blog-o-sphere for some time now. Whether or not it’s essential to raid, or even to play, with addons tacked on to your UI. Brigwyn, of the Hunting Lodge, thinks that it would be better if we all played the game ‘as it was intended’, whereas many other bloggers and WoW players feel that it was intended to be played with addons, since Blizzard allowed them.

So where do I stand? I love addons, and I’ll always use them. But that doesn’t mean have to. Some mods like Deadly Boss Mods, make things considerably easier in dungeons and raids, and if you don’t like the default UI, addons could be a good option for you. But I don’t think anyone should be pressured into using addons because it will “make them better players”. That’s a load of crap. Being a better players will make you a better players, addons have nothing to do with it.

Sure, there are classes out there that benifit from a custom UI. Feral druids being a great example. It’s tough to raid with the default UI when you have so much to keep an eye on. Does that mean it’s impossible? Of course not. People can raid with default UIs and still do more damage then raiders who pimp their UI to the max. It’s a game of skill, not of robots telling you what to do.

But, on the same hand, if you like addons, why not use them? I play with them, and I think I’d go a little bit crazy without it. More than a little, in fact. But, addons are tools. Never consider them something more than that. They might help your game, and they might not. But the thing that’s going to make the biggest difference- is you.

I love User Interface addons (or UI mods, for short). I always have, and from the very begining, tweaking my interface to suit my needs has been a fun part of WoW for me. Above, you can see the interface I used to run with. This is a shot from my very first raid (I ran Naxx 10 once, and Naxx 25 once with my guild- the extent of our PvE, a few months ago in the fall).

You can see my UI which looks nothing like the default one. I was actually a big fan of this UI, largely because I made it my self- it’s 100% original (I didn’t write the addons, mind you, but the design was mine). That UI is the product of a couple weeks work, tweaking this, adding that. It was a lot of fun to play on. Of course patch 3.3 dropped while I was away from WoW, and on my return they were all outdated, and I had to reset my UI. I haven’t had it in me to re-do the old one, for several reasons.

First, the UI was very clunky. It didn’t fill my whole screen, but the lower half was dominated by it. Also, it wasn’t tailored to my spec at all. The HUD (heads up display, the bars in the middle) was perhaps the only thing that really pertained to feral dps (which I knew nothing about, at the time). Also, it lagged me out a lot. I run WoW on a laptop (which isn’t the best idea, I know) with a built-in chip set for graphics. I just couldn’t handle big 25 man raids, with spells flying everywhere, and a gigantic number of addons running in the background.

So, I’ve tried to make my current UI as light as possible. I’m using the default frames, just moved with Move Anything, and I’m running a few feral addons: Feral By Night (which isn’t working for me, oddly, I’m still tinkering), Bad Kitty, and Grid for my raid frames. It makes WoW a lot smoother and less laggy.

Now, if you understand what I’m talking about, good. If not, don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten the ponit of this blog. I want to teach you the basics. Now, I don’t have the time here to explain everything about User Interfaces here. But No Stock UI is a great ressource. I love it, and for all your addon needs, hit it up. I’ve been meaning to do a guest author bit about addons 101 for Matticus down there (*ahem* three months overdue *coughs* still working on it *sneeze*). But, for UI in a nut shell- here it is.

The default blizzard UI, (that is the way the screen looks when you play with no addons) is not the limit of the appearance of WoW to you, the player. You can customize it with addons called… addons. They do everything you can possibly imagine, from changing the font of your chatbox, to moving player and target frames, to creating frames that weren’t even there originally. You can check gearscores, track cooldowns, and assign keybindings with the greatest of ease (sometimes- other times it’s a royal pain). If you’re interested, go to wow.curse.com and donwload addons. There are other sites (WoWInterface, being another excellent one), but you can get pretty much anything you need from curse, in my experience.

Now, like I said, I don’t have time to explain everything UI here, but check out the official blizzard forum dedicated to the topic, or just hang around sites like No Stock UI. The real purpose of this post is to adress a growing topic in the WoW community, whether or not you NEED addons to play WoW. Now, this post has gone too long as is, so I’ll cut it here, and finish up with a part two (sometime, probably later tonight). For the time being, enjoy shifting through my rambling, and happy UI-ing!

So, as promised, I’m going to begin taking all your new 80s out there through some of the basics. If you’ve done any dungeons, or groups quests while you were leveling (which is likely, especially with the advent of the dungeon finder), you probably know a little about rotations. Simply put, for pretty much all roles (with the possible exception of healers) rotations are pretty important. They’re the order in which you use moves to maximize your dps.

Now I don’t pretend to be an expert on every class. If you want specifics on a rotation right for you, hit up places like WoW.com or ElitistJerks. They’re great resources for class-specifics, if you want to learn more. But, basically, you want to use all your abilities in the most efficient way. Whether that means clicking the pretty lit up buttons (I’m looking at you, Ret paladins), or going through a cycle of DoTs (locks, big and small, especially affliction ones) it really varies depending on your class and spec. Even tanks have rotations. The difference being that they want to incorporate moves that give them the most possible threat, not the most possible damage.

Now, if this seems confusing, and you feel like you’re a little over your head, you have a couple options. First, you could hang around here, and read my posts as they come out, hopefully getting a good understanding of some of the basics. Look for “The Basics-” posts. Or, (if you want to get up to date more quickly) you could hit up forums like ElitistJerks, or sites like WoW.com for everything you could ever want to know about your class. They’re great tools for getting off the ground a bit.

Now, before I hear any of you complaining, I don’t want to hear it. I’m dealing with a feral cat dps rotation. For those of you seasoned veterans out there, you know exactly what that means. There is no rotation. Instead we have a long and complex priority-based algorithm. Yes, you heard that right. Please don’t make me repeat it, I don’t think I could spell it again. But it’s around 15 lines long, and about as complicated as it gets. So don’t tell me you can’t deal with a rotation of moves. If I can deal with feral dps, anyone can learn rotations.

Complaints about my spec aside, rotations are very important. The all important DPS (damage per second) and tanking aggro (the threat that makes mobs attack you) is based heavily on how well you use what you’ve got. All the gear in the world won’t make you better at playing your class. Only practice can do that.

So, what are you doing sitting around here for? The whole wide world of random dungeons await. Take a moment, check some of the sites I recommended, or just run a google search. Get a rotation that works for you down. Now, before you can talk yourself out of it, go run heroics (if you havent’ been already). The rotation is the place to start, and you should get all the practice you can get. Don’t be afraid to get your feet wet. Lack of practice will only come back to haunt you later.

So I haven’t posted in a long time, and I’m sorry about that. The truth of the matter is I picked up a resto off spec for PvP and I’ve spent the last weeks gearing it up, and getting in touch with my inner arena healer. Either way, I’m sitting pretty around 800 resil (still not great, but passable) and I’m going to take a break from that and get back into PvE (which is, after all, the poin of this blog).

My sudden leap to tree-dom means a couple things for this blog. Firstly, I’m no longer going to be PvEing as a boomkin, since my balance spec had to go away (I had no intention of dropping my feral main spec). That means that I’ll be going at it as a kitty, and delving into the mysteries of feral dps. I realize I did a whole post taking you through my boomkin gear… but you’ll just have to ignore that.

One small draw-back to my feral spec is that I don’t exactly have what you might call… a PvE set. I have a motly collection of deadly PvP gear (I haven’t worked on that spec in some time, since back in November. Deadly was all the rage back then). So, I’m going to be running my first few heroics in PvP. Not exactly ideal, but I can get by.

So, I don’t have time for a massive post right now, but rest assured that I’ll be posting more soon, and that this blog is not, by any means, dead. I’m using this post to officially start my PvE adventures, and I’ll update it shortly with the first wave of heroics. I’ll try and make this a guide that with apply to fresh 80s the world over, and hopefully my adventures and misadventures in the big, scary world of raiding, will be useful to someone out there.